Solution to Unemployment - Domestics

The persistent high unemployment rate in the US can be solved easily if we pay close attend to the trend that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer, with a fast diminishing middle class in this country.

Let us cast our eyes towards our mother country - The United Kingdom of Great Britain and the Northern Ireland - for solutions, say in Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë time.  That country in that time can serve a good model for us.

First, let's get women back to dependency, and that can get rid of roughly half the population in the work force, with the side benefit of pleasing our Bible touting fundamentalists.

Second, let's revive the careers of domestics or servitude.  There are so much wealth going to the already fabulously rich, it is conceivable that they will find the well-trained domestics quite nice to keep.  They will have butlers, maids, pages, valets, footmen, gardeners, cooks, chauffeurs, doctors, nurses, laundresses, pool boys, dwarfs, etc.

The list will go on forever.  For example, according to The Domestic Servant Class in Eighteenth-Century England, "the Earl of Northumberland in 1521 kept 166 servants and Bishop of Ely before his death in 1533 kept 100.

According to Giles Jacob, the average large country family would include twenty servants; and in his estimate of the cost of keeping that number he provides for eight or ten liveries, thus indicating that half or almost half of them would be men. Peter Legh's household must have been about this size in 1760. His menservants included a butler, an under-butler, a cook, a coach-man, a groom, a groom's helper, a postillion, two footmen and a park-keeper--ten in all."

To make things better for the employers, all the domestics should be classified as part of their households to reduce their unfairly large tax burdens.  Maybe our federal and state governments should give these employers tax credit for each domestic they gallantly, selflessly employ. 

In order to make sure that a large amount of the unemployed get absorbed into the domestic servants market, we must increase the wealth percentage of the rich, the ensure that they will not hesitate to spend $100 or $200 per month to hire a footman or two.

Surely, we can reduced our unemployment rate to the nadir and our country will once again, be the envy of the whole world.